


Frostbite

by VioletThePorama



Category: HLVRAI - Fandom, Half-Life VR But The AI Is Self Aware
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Found Family, Gen, Gordon is the AI au, Gratuitous use of Binary, HLVRAI, I spelled his name Benry the whole time, Introspection, Joshua is mentioned, They all just need to be a family, They're going to be fine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:40:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25605997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VioletThePorama/pseuds/VioletThePorama
Summary: Gordon felt isolated, which was impossible because there were always other people around him. He was flooded with a constant influx of information at every turn while he was stuck in the depths of Black Mesa, but some of it seemed off. Maybe it was how extraordinary the situation was. Not everybody had aliens attacking them at every corner.Or maybe none of it was real.Loosely based off the multiplayer au by thecryptidcorvid on tumblr.
Comments: 24
Kudos: 128





	Frostbite

Being Aware was like being on ice. It was a struggle where Gordon was constantly slipping back and forth, an uphill fight that left him aching and tired. Whenever he thought he might have a grasp on how to navigate his knowledge, he spun out of control and  _ Hello _ !  _ We need to keep moving _ . There were blank spots in his memory where he was fully submerged in his code. Even when he wasn’t fully submerged, it was rare that he had more than a hazey awareness of his surroundings, though it was slowly getting easier as he fought tooth and nail for his awareness. 

Gordon Freeman had only been alive for three weeks. He was a full grown adult of course, because at least the idiots who designed the game hadn’t been barbaric enough to put a child into the game. (Except  _ except _ -) But the majority of his life was simulated, a backstory coded into his head.

It was a slick slope on which he was stuck. 

The Science Team, as they had dubbed themselves, were chaotic and bloodthirsty. They went off script and backtracked and killed everyone that Gordon told them not to. This of course, had greatly alarmed the scientist before he had realized that absolutely  _ none of it mattered _ . Anybody who was important came back.

The other NPC’s were more alive than they should have been, though. Maybe they were like him, and he should have tried harder to save them. Conversations with many of them pulled at something in his code (01001001 00100111 01101101 00100000 01110011 01110100 01110101 01100011 01101011) and let him know that they too were going off script, gaining something that they weren’t meant to have and it  _ scared _ him. It really

“Hello Dr. Coomer!”

“Hello Gordon!”

“Hello Dr. Coomer!” 

“Hello Gordon!”

“Hello Dr. Coomer!”

“Would you two knock it off already?”

They knocked it off. 

They kept walking. 

The Science Team was awful. The Science Team was wonderful. Gordon loved them with all of his coding but he hated how they  _ left him _ . They desecrated the world and he rotted alone in rooms filled with crates and fluorescent lights and indestructible moths. 

The one who called himself Tommy (Tommy was the only one he could trust. Tommy wouldn’t lie to him. He  _ couldn’t _ .) once pulled him aside and quietly (anxiously) asked him if he knew what was going on. Gordon replied that of course he did! 

They had to get to the Lambda Lab!

He could never approach them with his knowledge. It wasn’t their fault that he was left alone, because they didn’t know. (Tommy suspected, didn’t he? Wasn’t that enough? Shouldn’t he have told everyone?) They didn’t know, because every time Gordon got up the nerve to tell them, the knowledge slipped out of his mind like water off a duck. 

The worst of it was when the world was turned off. After hours of an empty abyss (with nobody else around him nobody to talk to  _ nothing to see _ -), everything loaded up, and Gordon was reassembled from the thousands of 1’s and 0’s that he became when they were gone. At least the reconstruction process was infinitely less painful than the deconstruction. Rather than the burning feeling of being split apart, it was a simple tingle in his newly formed limbs.

Gordon’s job was to keep them on track. But when he could think for himself, he just wanted them to stop. The moments where they all formed a circle and sat on the floor talking was the best part of Gordon's life so far. Much better than the constant anxiety that came with herding the group. 

However, programming was programming, so he got them back on track. 

Benry stayed around long enough to get Gordon worked up over nothing, before he floundered and stalled and

“Hello! We should keep moving.”

The security guard took off not long after they began to make their way through Black Mesa, and Gordon’s mind slipped over how he melted into the wall, instead focusing on the next puzzle. He got over his artificial bought of happiness pretty quickly, and fussed at the team for their lack of coordination and for their murder of another scientist. Though he was more and more willing to let Dr. Coomer do as he wished with his ‘clones’ since they didn’t display any sentience…

Ah. Sentience.

“We will be at the Lambda lab soon,” Gordon informed everyone, stuttering over his thoughts until they went blank. Tommy gave him a bright smile that Gordon couldn’t help but return, while Bubby scoffed. 

“About three hours?” Dr. Coomer asked, nudging his shoulder. Gordon wanted to think. He wanted to realize that it had been longer than three hours since the last time that estimate had been given. 

He opened his mouth to say that it would be  _ so much longer _ , but as he got worked up, his code came along to sooth him. So he relaxed his tense shoulders and nodded. It sounded like a fair and proper estimate! “We should be at the Lambda Lab in about three hours!”

________________________________

“Go scout out ahead,” Bubby ordered, some time early on in the paths. By the time Gordon finally opened his mouth to ask why, he found that he was already out in the halls.

It was an idiotic task, and one of the ones that had first alerted him to what was happening. There were no enemies for him to ‘scout out’. Nothing was set to spawn outside of a certain range of

Nothing was to  _ spawn _ outside of

“Hello!” Gordon greeted a wall, stalling in his path. He let the code wash over his body, and allowed the message to leak out of his mouth even if none of the  _ players _ -

“We need to get a move on!” the theoretical scientist continued, smiling. 

01001001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01101000 01101111 01110111 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100101 00101110

Gordon sat against one of the walls rather than patrolling like he had been asked (told) to do. He settled in front of a mostly intact window and watched his reflection, wondering if he would ever see his face without the bulky helmet on. Eventually, the rest of the Science Team flooded out into the hall.

Tommy smiled at him. Benry broke the window.

________________________________

Gordon pretended to ignore the moments when the group converged without him after the first instance. Initially, whenever he was left solving a puzzle by himself (poorly), or was asked to look for enemies, he stayed separated from them of his own volition. If he acted like nothing was wrong, it would eventually become true. He pretended not to hear them discuss that the 01100111 01100001 01101101 01100101 was getting buggier as time went on. That he (Mr. Freeman, Gordon, the NPC) was glitching more often. But the worried tones from Tommy and the whispers from the rest of the group set him on edge, and when it began to happen more and more often, Gordon pulled himself together enough to lurk nearby.

During one of their group discussions from which Gordon was excluded, Benry managed to scare him out of his skin by walking out of a wall next to where the NPC had been listening (lying in wait). It had blown his cover, and they continued on like usual, with the members of the Science Team giving him looks varying from suspicion to concern. 

The next time, Gordon muffled his shriek of surprise, and focused on Benry rather than giving himself away. 

The player character had a rare expression on his face, though it was still unreadable for the most part. Gordon wanted to point it out or tease him about it, but it kept him Aware longer if he stewed in quiet. So he pretended to ignore how his face buzzed with static, and he (softly, softly in the voice he wanted to talk to his son for the first time with) greeted Benry. 

That seemed to do more to get through to the befuddling player than anything else he had tried thus far, and they spent the next half hour sitting together while Benry Spoke in his different colored orbs. It distracted Gordon from his spying mission, but it entertained him, so he listened and commented while Benry rambled about video games. (Games that he would soon leave Gordon to play. Ones that the others would go to once they were done with him. What would happen to him once they were gone? The servers shut off for good?)

Games he would never have a chance to introduce his son to. Well, whatever Benry was rambling on about sounded too violent for small children, but it did bring up a few thoughts, and Gordon didn’t feel up to keeping himself from spiraling. 

He seemed sort of like a bad parent from his backstory-

“Hello! We should keep moving.” 

From his memories. He didn’t know whether or not that  _ still  _ made him a bad father, or if it could ever be changed in the future. Gordon was absent a lot, always away at work. He had an ex, but he couldn’t recall anything about them aside from the vague idea that they were watching Joshua. And Joshua… he couldn’t recall much about his son. He liked cowboys, maybe? He was small, but older than he had been in the picture Gordon had produced from his locker. 

The sound of the others became a bit louder, voices more distinct as they drew nearer. Benry was still talking. It was sort of endearing how the group was so information-bound, and Gordon was learning more than he had in his entire life.

Of a few weeks.

“Benry?”

Said security guard made a noise, low in quality and dimmed in volume due to whatever he was speaking through. Gordon took it as confirmation to go ahead. 

“I wish Joshua was real.”

Benry jerked and looked at him, face expressionless, though his body language said otherwise. “What do you-?” the player asked, sounding stunned. 

01000010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110111 01100001 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101111 01101111 00100000 01101100 01100001 01110100 01100101 00101110 00001010

“Hello! We should keep moving!”

________________________________

Gordon became Aware sometime during another puzzle. Slowly, as he pushed a box around, he recognized the area they were in. The rooms, while seemingly identical,  _ felt _ different in a way that Gordon couldn’t describe. 

It was going to happen soon. 

The theoretical scientist had been dreading what was to be, but he couldn’t change it. (He knew, instinctively, what the group needed to do, and where they needed to go. The knowledge of what was to happen to him was intertwined with their path.) They couldn’t progress without going through that room, and since Gordon was still with them, he had two options. He could lock himself up somewhere while he was Aware, and hope that he didn’t try to follow them once he wasn’t. 

Or he could let the soldiers chop off his arm. 

There wasn’t much that could be done about it. But… fear welled up in Gordons chest. The program wanted to believe that he could be real. So he stepped over the piece of debris he had been caught on (that was always getting him stuck when he was submerged in his programming. Ladders tended to be a struggle in either state.), and caught up with the group. 

“Dr Coomer,” he greeted as he came to a stop. The fellow scientist turned to happily acknowledge him, but Gordon pressed on before he could. He needed to get it out, and  _ fast _ . “They’re going to take my arm.”

“... What?” Bubby asked distantly. 

Tommy blinked at him, stopping an arms length away from him. “What do you mean, Mr. Freeman?”

“I mean!” Gordon snapped, desperately pushing out what he could while static climbed up his throat and seized his right arm under the elbow. “There’s going to be a 01100011 01110101 01110100 01110011 01100011 01100101 01101110 01100101 00100001” he tried. Then he saw their expressions and tried again, shaking and swallowing back his default line as long as possible. “Look it up! Dr. Coomer you can’t let me go there,  _ please _ \- Hello! We need to keep moving.”

________________________________

Awareness came in the morning. Immediately, he jerked his head to the side and looked at his hand, which was  _ thankfully _ still attached to the rest of his arm. 

“Hello Gordon,” Dr. Coomer greeted. Gordon opened his mouth, halfway through a greeting before the scientist cut him off. “We’re seeing what we can do.”

“What do you mean?” Gordon asked. “Hello Dr. Coomer! We need to-”

“Keep going, yeah. We’ve heard it before. Get some new material,” Benry scoffed, muttering from a distance. Gordon narrowed his eyes, but obliging turned to Bubby once he began to talk. 

“We looked it up,” The grumpier scientist said. “None of the other Gordon’s seemed quite as annoying as you manage to be.”

“Hello! We need to keep moving,” Gordon told him, stuttering and stumbling with the weight of the next words he’s allowed. “ _ It’s hard _ .”

“We know,” Tommy smiled. “We can try to help if you think you can tell us.”

“Hello!” The NPC greeted. “Hello! Hello! It’s going to take a long time to get to the Lambda lab.”

“I know,” Dr. Coomer reached out and put a hand on Gordon’s shoulder. “But we have time.”

Ice was a bit easier to navigate with a grounding force.

**Author's Note:**

> Welp. It's there.
> 
> I couldn't stop thinking about the implications of a multiplayer au, even though I didn't really look into the actual au that much. I just wanted to write a reverse where the AI was all alone. 
> 
> Writing fanfiction did not keep me from thinking about hlvrai. So why not write more, ya know? Hope you had fun. Ship whoever you want from this, I just didn't focus on anybody enough for it.


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